In a Yellow Wood

by Gore Vidal

The little voice no longer whispered in his ear and there was nothing but silence and the beating of his heart, the slow beating of his heart.

The shade of the window fluttered in the outside wind. Bits of light gleamed around the shade as it fluttered. Lights from signs and behind those lights, gray and massive, was the light of early morning. The room grew colder.

He got under the blanket and he closed his eyes tight and thought of nothing: thought of shapes and shadows and lights and colors and all the things that comprise nothing: he could not sleep.

Robert Holton made a case for himself as he lay in the occasionally broken dark.

He had no gift. He was an average person. Perhaps not quite average, he had had many advantages. He was among the many, though. He could not make a world separate. He wished now that he had told Carla that: he could not make a world separate. He belonged to the world of all people and it was wrong to retreat from that world. He felt noble as he thought of this: it was an excellent argument and he wished that he had used it.

To have gone to live with Carla would have been a retreat from all that was right. Right? What had Lewis said about the planes of understanding? It didn’t matter because Lewis was just another little fairy. He was perverted in everything. No, it was right not to live with Carla. He had to do what was expected of him.

Robert Holton built himself an argument, and as he built his barricades stronger he was aware of discontent, well-hidden beyond the barricade but still alive. Duty was important and difficult. Nothing that was right was easy. Was that true? He was becoming confused.

He had worn too many faces. He thought of the myriad faces he had been made to wear. He had been different with every person he’d ever known. This lack of consistency bothered him. In the army he had been without care, without ambition; he had been like Trebling.

With the people in the office he had been cold or warm, as they were. He had given them what they expected. He had been an actor with too many rôles to play. Tonight he had played all of them for Carla and then he had become lost and he had tried to be himself and he found that he was not enough.

Every person saw him differently, not entirely because every person was different, but because he had also intended it to be that way. Now he did not know himself. He had no way of knowing the person behind the myriad faces.